What was the Boston Massacre?

The Boston Massacre was a March 5, 1770 confrontation in which a small detachment of British soldiers stationed in Boston fired into a hostile crowd outside the Custom House on King Street, killing five colonists and wounding six others. The deeper cause was the presence of about 2,000 British regulars sent to Boston in October 1768 to enforce the Townshend duties of 1767 and protect customs commissioners. A town of about 16,000 people was suddenly burdened with quartering troops, off duty soldiers competing for scarce jobs, and constant friction over military discipline.

On the evening of March 5, after several days of brawling between soldiers and ropewalk workers, a young apprentice named Edward Garrick taunted a British sentry, Private Hugh White, outside the Custom House. White struck Garrick with the butt of his musket, and a crowd of perhaps 300 to 400 people gathered in the snow, throwing snowballs, oyster shells, and ice at the lone sentry. Captain Thomas Preston led a relief party of seven soldiers from the 29th Regiment to the scene with bayonets fixed but did not give the order to load.

After someone struck Private Hugh Montgomery with a club, knocking him to the ground, Montgomery rose and fired. In the panic that followed, the rest of the squad fired without orders. Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent often considered the first martyr of the Revolution, was among the first to fall. Samuel Gray, a ropemaker, James Caldwell, a sailor, and Samuel Maverick, a 17 year old apprentice, also died on the scene; Patrick Carr lingered and died on March 14. Six others were wounded.

Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson defused the immediate crisis by promising prompt prosecution, removing the troops to Castle William in the harbor, and confining Preston and his men. John Adams and Josiah Quincy II agreed to defend the soldiers in their fall 1770 trials, an unpopular but principled stance that demonstrated colonial commitment to fair trial. Captain Preston was acquitted on October 30, 1770. Of his men, six were acquitted and two, including Montgomery, were convicted of manslaughter, branded on the thumb, and released.

Paul Revere produced a famous engraving of the scene that exaggerated British aggression and circulated widely in the colonial press. Sons of Liberty leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock made March 5 an annual day of remembrance for the next 13 years.